“We need never be ashamed of our tears.”
Charles Dickens
I have a leaky eye. It doesn’t leak as much as it used to; mainly just when it’s cold out and I’m late and running to catch a bus.
On the upside, most bus drivers will stop for the crying girl chasing them down the street, it’s a bit of a moral imperative.
Of course, I’m not actually crying. Rather my eye drainage hole is small and tends to grow over, which prevents my eye from draining properly; hence the tears spilling out of my eye and down my cheek. Apparently it’s a common problem for elderly women; I’m just ahead of my time.
Who even knew your eyes had drainage holes? I guess if I had given it any thought I would have realized that tears need to go somewhere. But that’s the thing about functioning body parts, you don’t give much thought as to why they work. It isn’t until something malfunctions that we realize what curious and delicate machinery our bodies are.
Apparently it is the lacrimal glands that produce your tears. If your eyes are working properly, tears flow from the lacrimal glands over the surface of your eye and drain into tiny holes (known as puncta), which are located in the corners of your eye. After draining into your puncta holes, small canals move the tears from the tear sac to the tear duct, and finally into your nose and throat, where your tears are reabsorbed.
That’s your anatomy lesson for today.
Anyway, after an assessment that involved putting a hollow needle into my puncta (eye drainage hole), and forcing water through said needle’s hollow tip, where it surged through my eye canals and eventually drained into my nose and throat (producing a delightful drowning sensation), it was decided that I would need a minor surgery called a Punctoplasty. The solution they said was simple: we’ll just cut you a bigger hole!
The worst part of the surgery by far is the anesthetizing needle that precedes it. You must hold very still as they insert an enormous needle into the corner of your open eye, all while the doctor berates you for your semi-autonomic reflexes, saying things like: “Just relax. Keep your eyes open. Just hold still and keep your eyes open!”. Oh I’m sorry doctor, I don’t know whatever is wrong with me, trying to close my eye just because you’re threatening to jab a giant needle into it?
The punctoplasty itself was easy-peasy; with a quick and painless snip I now had a bigger hole. The challenge after that was making my way home with that anesthetized eye; which is a very curious sensation.
When all is said and done, my eye works much better now and rarely overflows; except perhapes on a cold morning like this one, when I’m in transit. And while a little weeping does add a certain dramatic mystery to my persona, I do get annoyed when my mascara starts to run.
Climbing onto the bus, I take a seat and rummage around in my purse for a tissue. Something, anything to clean up this mess. Nothing. Nada. As the tears stream down my face, drawing a sympathetic look from the elderly lady across from me, I am getting desperate. That is when my rummaging hand settles on a tampon in the corner of my purse. Hmmm…. That absorbent tip would work. How weird would it be if I unwrapped a tampon and used it to dab at the corner of my eye?